Search on this site - well - sucks

[joeychgo]

It really does these days.

If I search for something such as:

MySQL Error : You have an error in your SQL syntax;


I get this:

The search term you specified ( is under the minimum word length (4) and therefore will not be found. Please make this term longer. If this term contains a wildcard, please make this term more specific.

Then even if I fix it - I have to wait 20 seconds before I can search again.

Search needs to be improved here. Often, I cant search for things such as db errors and other things to see if someone else had the same problem.

[Andy Huang]

This really has to do with usability versus system resource availibility...
The minimum word length is set by a setting in the Admin CP and site admins can adjust that as they see fit; but having shorter words means more words needs to be indexed, and smaller commonly used words such as "the" etc. will also be caught into it which in turn cause the index to grow huge, and result in taking more resources to search.

Small forums aside, when a forum have lots of people on it, and always have people actively search, it isn't exactly the best idea to allow searches to take over all the system resource while others browsing cannot see the information they want to see.

One typical suggestion I've seen webmasters done is to incorporate a google search option so people can search using google's search (IE: site:vbulletin.com MySQL Error, Syntax error on blah blah blah), and that seems to work for most users.

[joeychgo]

I understand all that - but im referring to this forum specifically. Not the search function as a whole.

When I come here I need to be able to search for things such as db error strings and whatnot.

[clothahump]

Totally agree, it is a total PITA.